The latest is that the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation is pulling extracurricular activities. That’ll really bite once school begins again in September, but it means teams that start with late-summer practices won’t have them and preparation for events and tournaments won’t begin.

Last week, the Ontario English Catholic Teachers Association requested a “no board” report from a conciliator appointed to help it and the government reach a deal, which essentially means the attempt has failed. A strike, probably starting small but escalating, is the next stage for them, too.

That’s bad, but this is worse: the government and the unions — those two and the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario — aren’t talking anymore. The Association des enseignantes et des enseignants Franco-ontariens, the fourth of the big four education unions, is still officially negotiating but nobody expects that to last.

Maybe the summer would let the two sides bargain in relative peace. Nope.

(Disclosures: I come from a family of teachers, all now retired. In the fall, I’ll have two kids in public elementary school.)

“The government’s aim is to make profound cuts to our collective agreements that would have a negative impact on students, their families, and our hard-working teachers, who are already stretched to the limit,” said the Catholic teachers’ union president Ann Hawkins, announcing the failure of her association’s negotiations. “Our members are standing up for what’s right for the education system, principles the employer does not seem to be taking seriously.”

The issues are the same as ever: changes to prep and supervisory time, and class sizes. Not wages, everyone says, but they’re related: The deficit-fighting Liberals’ commitment to “net-zero” labour deals, in which any increase in spending on anything has to be offset by savings elsewhere, means working conditions will be put under pressure even by a cost-of-living increase.

Sometimes two sides have positions that are so incompatible that they have to fight. The system allows for strikes and lockouts. Factory workers march out to the picket lines and both sides hunker down to see who can endure the lost revenues and wages the longest, all aware that they might be doing irreparable damage to the business. Somebody wins, somebody loses.

It looks as though that’s where the province and the teachers are. The hell of public-sector strikes and lockouts is that the customers can’t go elsewhere. Teachers know their jobs will still be there, no matter what. The risk is being legislated back to work on terms they don’t like. That wouldn’t be great for them, but no worse than just accepting the government’s offers.

The risk for the government is greater. Education Minister Liz Sandals and Premier Kathleen Wynne will take a lot of the blame for any strike, simply because they’re the people parents can reach. Dalton McGuinty staked a lot on labour peace in the schools when he defeated the Progressive Conservatives in 2003 and he eventually lost what he bet; Wynne did the same when she took over and she risks blowing it, too.

In the 2014 election, the teachers’ unions didn’t endorse anyone for premier but, spooked by the Progressive Conservatives’ plan to cut 100,000 public-sector jobs, they did encourage their members to vote for anybody who seemed most likely to defeat a Tory. Most of the time, that was a Liberal. Next time, maybe not.

The New Democrats are leading nationally and in the most recent polling in Ontario, too. The next election is a long three years away and campaigns matter: The provincial NDP are doing so well after several months in which leader Andrea Horwath has been practically invisible. But which party do we imagine the teachers’ unions would prefer to back, if its candidates had serious odds of winning in numbers? The Liberals win union support if it’s a choice between them and the Tories, but in any other matchup — well, Rae Days were a long time ago.

As much as the Liberals have invested in peace in the schools, they have at least as much in their promise to balance the budget by the next election. They’ve given themselves a practically impossible challenge and unless they have some great manoeuvre they’re waiting until the last second to use, they’re going to suffer for it.

“In the lead up to the last election the debate went beyond differences over our approach and at times became personal. The lawsuit between us, and the comments that led to it, did not reflect our view that the other is in fact a great mother / father, an honourable person and a dedicated public servant,” the statement said.

In spring 2014, with Wynne’s minority government teetering, the Tories wanted desperately to connect the premier personally to the scandal surrounding her predecessor Dalton McGuinty’s cancelling of two gas-powered generating stations west of Toronto, where the Liberals were worried about losing seats. The cancellations cost over $1 billion in all, according to a long-term reckoning by the province’s auditor general, vastly more than the public had been promised, and was done before the 2011 election.

Compounding the trouble, McGuinty’s chief of staff David Livingston was — and still is — under criminal investigation for allegedly getting the boyfriend of another McGuinty staffer access to government computers to try to erase documents about the decisions. Sworn statements and witnesses testifying to a legislature committee have said that happened in McGuinty’s last days in office, just before Wynne took over as premier in winter 2013.

Neither McGuinty nor Wynne has been accused of any wrongdoing by police. Nothing in any documents police have yet filed in court as they’ve sought search warrants and production orders has suggested either premier knew about Livingston’s actions. But for months the Progressive Conservatives kept up a constant beat of questions in and out of the legislature, demanding to know what Wynne knew about Livingston’s actions.

Eventually Wynne decide she’d had enough and threatened to sue if Hudak and MacLeod — the Nepean-Carleton MPP and Hudak’s mouthpiece on the gas-plants issue — didn’t cut it out. “You alleged that I personally ‘oversaw and possibly ordered the criminal destruction on documents’ and that criminal conduct took place in my office,” she told them. That was false and they knew it, she said.

The two responded that Wynne was trying to muzzle legitimate questions from the opposition and refused to be cowed. Wynne sued them for $2 million.

Perhaps more satisfyingly for her, she also won the election that came the following June. Hudak led his party to a terrible defeat and resigned the leadership. MacLeod ran to succeed him but dropped out. Both Hudak and MacLeod remain MPPs.

“As colleagues and as political adversaries, we will continue to pursue and debate all relevant issues in the Ontario Legislature and other appropriate venues, but we are pleased to put our legal battles behind us and to issue this public reminder to everyone involved in politics that even though politicians disagree, politics is at its best when conducted in open and free debate based on respect and honesty,” the joint statement released Thursday says.

Conciliatory as it is, the statement doesn’t exactly include an apology from anyone and there’s no mention of damages being paid. Wynne’s spokeswoman said she had nothing to say beyond the statement and MacLeod didn’t immediately respond to a request to talk about it.

]]>http://ottawacitizen.com/news/politics/reevely-wynne-settles-defamation-suit-against-tory-leaders-over-gas-plant-claims/feed0070214-0703_tuns-W.jpg-Ont_Elxn_PC_20140612-POS2014061317365961davidreevelyReevely: If you want big transit projects, elect a pro-transit governmenthttp://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/reevely-if-you-want-big-transit-projects-elect-a-pro-transit-government
http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/reevely-if-you-want-big-transit-projects-elect-a-pro-transit-government#commentsFri, 03 Jul 2015 19:09:04 +0000http://ottawacitizen.com/?p=567818]]>Transit types are desolate over the failure of this attempt in British Columbia to raise sales taxes to pay for new rail and bus lines throughout greater Vancouver. Here’s the lesson: If you want a big public project, elect a government with the nerve to see it through.

The Vancouver plebiscite was a months-long mail-in affair asking people in and around Vancouver whether they’d pay an extra half-point in sales tax to fund $7.5-billion worth of transit projects. The idea was backed by nearly all the local mayors, who are maddened that the provincial government won’t help pay for things they think are critical.

Nope, said the people, in results announced this week. They rejected the proposal 62 to 38. Even in granola-strewn, transit-dependent Vancouver proper, it failed 51-49. Voters in only three jurisdictions agreed with the proposition: two tiny villages on the fringes of the city and a district dominated by the University of British Columbia. The three of them total about 4,400 votes among the 757,000 cast.

This kind of direct democracy, seeking yes-or-no votes on particular issues, isn’t how we Canadians ordinarily govern ourselves. Possibly because we’re a skeptical, cautious people who say no to things by default. The way it’s supposed to work, we elect people who see the world’s problems more or less the way we do and whose judgment we more or less trust to deal with them. If, after a few years, we think they’ve done a decent job, we re-elect them.

The recent history of such direct votes in Canada is a history of rejections. When Ontarians voted on electoral reform, we decided against it. British Columbians did, too, and against harmonizing their provincial and federal sales taxes. Quebecers have voted against separation twice. Canada as a whole voted against the Charlottetown Accord on constitutional reform.

You’d almost get to thinking that a good way to kill an idea is to put it to a popular vote. Especially if it’s a complicated idea that’s easily caricatured.

TransLink, the Vancouver area’s transit agency, is not popular, and the caricature there was that residents were being asked to give a bloated, inefficient government body a load more money to spend on God knows what, forever. Ginning up such a campaign in nearly any city with a large transit system wouldn’t be that hard. Who loves OC Transpo or the TTC? Who thinks Montreal’s STM is a model of efficiency?

It might seem like an oddity that Vancouverites were asked to vote on funding transit projects at all. British Columbians didn’t vote on whether to spend $600 million on the Sea-to-Sky Highway between Vancouver and Whistler, or $130 million in improvements to the Kicking Horse Pass that links B.C. and Alberta.

The thing is, Greater Vancouver has a bunch of mayors who think their cities and towns need more transit and a provincial government, led by Christy Clark, that thinks it shouldn’t pay for it. The popular vote was a way to break the logjam, which, well, it did.

Here in Ontario, the province is planning to spend billions and billions on both road and transit projects, not demanding votes on every single one. That’s what politicians do when they actually believe in something: they get going, believing that they’ll be proven right in time for the next election. Dalton McGuinty believed in raising taxes for health care and in harmonizing provincial and federal sales taxes, unpopular as both those moves were at the time, so he did it. We re-elected him.

Kathleen Wynne is betting we’ll do the same for her despite the budget squeezes she’s imposing on schools and health care, the impending sale of most of Hydro One, the fiddling with the LCBO and the Beer Store, the Ontario pension plan. We’d probably vote against all these things if you asked us. But they’ll be necessary evils in the past by 2018, tiny matters against all the construction, a balanced budget and a growing economy (Wynne and her fellow Liberals hope), just like McGuinty’s taxes and Mike Harris’s cuts in the 1990s.

We get governments with vision by electing politicians with vision, not by trying to force leaders to do things they don’t believe in.

]]>http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/reevely-if-you-want-big-transit-projects-elect-a-pro-transit-government/feed0Kathleen Wynne; Christy ClarkdavidreevelyReevely: Kathleen Wynne's inconvenient libel suithttp://ottawacitizen.com/news/politics/reevely-kathleen-wynnes-inconvenient-libel-suit
http://ottawacitizen.com/news/politics/reevely-kathleen-wynnes-inconvenient-libel-suit#commentsWed, 25 Mar 2015 21:28:58 +0000http://ottawacitizen.com/?p=492241]]>The Liberals’ removal of a clause in a bill against SLAPP suits that could have killed Premier Kathleen Wynne’s libel suit against two top Tories had absolutely nothing to do with that case, Wynne’s office says.

Spokeswoman Zita Astravas responded Wednesday to some clever work by Canadaland writer Sean Craig. Before the last election, the Liberals had introduced a bill aimed at protecting people from lawsuits aimed at shutting them up about issues of significant public interest.

These “strategic lawsuits against public participation” are instances where a big company, faced with a vocal activist or two objecting to something it does, sues the protesters for libel or some other similar thing in the hopes of making them be quiet. Maybe the case has merit and maybe it doesn’t, but that’s not the point — the point is for a large entity with a well-funded legal department to threaten a little guy into silence.

The bill died with the spring election call. Had it passed, it could have been used by anybody facing such proceedings, even if they were already underway.

Like a lot of bills that were annihilated with the election, it’s been brought back by the Liberals with their new majority. But with a tweak: it only applies to new cases now.

That’s convenient for Wynne, Craig points out, because she happens to have a libel suit in progress against former Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak and current party luminary Lisa MacLeod, for things they said about her in relation to the Liberals’ gas-plants scandal.

Last year they suggested, in the heat of politics, that maybe Wynne had been involved in an alleged plot to eliminate evidence of what senior Liberals were thinking when they cancelled two Toronto-area gas-powered generating stations, at what turned out to be considerable expense. The police are still investigating Dalton McGuinty’s last chief of staff, David Livingston, over allegations that he breached the public trust by letting an outsider into government computers shortly before McGuinty left office, so that they could erase a bunch of documents that might have told us what McGuinty’s brain trust had known about the costs.

(Livingston denies any wrongdoing. No charges have been laid.)

“She oversaw and possibly ordered the destruction of documents during the cover-up,” Hudak said of Wynne.

Wynne was a cabinet minister when the cancellation decisions were made but there’s never been a shred of evidence made public that she knew a thing about any attempts to erase any documents. So she sued Hudak and MacLeod for saying she did.

And now, man, has that lawsuit become inconvenient. The comments against which it’s directed were pretty definitely offside, regardless whether they were legally actionable. The suit did a good job of stopping the Tories from repeating them. But now it’s still there.

Although Wynne is suing for $2 million, she says what she actually wants is a retraction and apology. The majority government might be just as good a balm for her wounded soul, of course. Very likely she’d be perfectly happy for her suit to vanish at this point but can’t drop it because then it’ll clearly look like just a political stunt.

It’s not clear that the anti-SLAPP bill, even were it in force today, would stop Wynne’s lawsuit.

The gas-plants business is a matter of public interest and Hudak and MacLeod were talking about it, which in general terms is the sort of talk that’s supposed to be protected by the legislation. The legislation gives judges leeway to let lawsuits proceed if they determine a case has “substantial merit,” there’s some real damage done and the defendant has “no valid defence.”

The assertion that Wynne “oversaw and possibly ordered the destruction of documents” is a biggie. It’s a factual claim that has no obvious basis. The Tories’ defence amounts to that they believed it to be true and/or that the gas-plants issue was important enough that it was OK for them, as politicians, to push the limits a little, to “ventilate” their concerns, as the statement of defence puts it.

This might work. Politicians like Wynne are expected to put up with a great deal when it comes to people saying mean things about them. But saying Wynne “oversaw … the destruction of documents” is, as I say, a big factual claim and the Tories’ defence does not claim that it was actually true, just that they had a legally defensible right to say it without knowing either way. I don’t think that defence is a guaranteed winner.

Would it be weak enough to count as “no valid defence”? A judge would have to decide. Also not a slam-dunk. But if it happened, it wouldn’t be great for Wynne to have her own case tossed as a SLAPP suit, thanks to her government’s own law.

Either way, the revision to the anti-SLAPP bill means it won’t have to be decided. Now Wynne’s lawsuit won’t be vulnerable to a claim that it’s a SLAPP even if and when the new bill passes.

As Craig’s Canadaland piece says, the revised bill also means two potentially bigger cases also won’t be covered: several lawsuits filed by Marineland over news stories about its treatment of its captive sea creatures, and a suit by Resolute Forest Products against Greenpeace over claims about Resolute’s practices in northern Ontario. Both bigger deals than the Wynne case, frankly.

Wynne, through Astravas, says her case had nothing to do with it:

The decision to remove the retroactive application of the Act was made for two main reasons:

1. Fairness to litigants already before the court: The government changed the application provision from the previous legislation on the principle that it was fair to people who started litigation to have recourse to the rules in force at the time the lawsuit was initiated rather than have the rules change in mid-process. While this was not something that was contemplated prior to the initial introduction, retroactive rule-making (as a matter of procedural fairness) is generally not something that is seen favourably by courts and legislatures.

2. Distraction from the important public interest purpose of the legislation: While the legislation was widely supported by all parties in the legislature (although the PCs voted against Bill 83 at second reading), the discussion of the legislation following introduction became clouded by the interests of a few current litigants and not the individual citizens whose voices had been silenced due to fear of SLAPP suits. We also heard from many proponents of the bill that the discussion of ongoing litigation was distracting from the important issues underlying the legislation.

For these reasons, and no others, the Premier’s Office supported the change to the Protection of Public Participation Act to remove its retroactive effect. This change was recommended by the Ministry of the Attorney General and adopted by Cabinet.

For these reasons, and no others, the Bill was updated.

The first point is particularly important. It is generally not done to change legal rules on people mid-stream. We don’t charge people with doing things that weren’t crimes at the time they did them. Creating new ways of fending off existing civil suits isn’t exactly the same thing but it’s similar.

Valid though it might be, the argument would look a lot more credible if it didn’t happen to benefit Wynne in particular.

]]>http://ottawacitizen.com/news/politics/reevely-kathleen-wynnes-inconvenient-libel-suit/feed0060414-0605_elxn_wynne2-W.jpg-0605_Wynne02.jpg-POS1406041609423312davidreevelyReevely: Ontario's opposition asks 131 straight questions about Sudburyhttp://ottawacitizen.com/news/politics/reevely-ontarios-opposition-asks-131-straight-questions-about-sudbury
http://ottawacitizen.com/news/politics/reevely-ontarios-opposition-asks-131-straight-questions-about-sudbury#commentsMon, 23 Mar 2015 15:09:31 +0000http://ottawacitizen.com/?p=490077]]>No town in Ontario has ever been so beloved in question period at Queen’s Park as Sudbury has the last several weeks. The opposition parties have asked pretty much the same questions about it over and over and over again, disregarding everything else the government has been up to and everything else that’s been happening in the province.

Liberal backbenchers get to ask questions of the ministers, too, so they’ve posed softballs on other subjects, but as far as the Progressive Conservatives and New Democrats are concerned, Sudbury is all there is.

Well, I say “Sudbury.” Specifically, the questions are about who in Premier Kathleen Wynne’s office knew what when about how would-be Liberal candidate Andrew Olivier got pushed out of the race, such that Elections Ontario thinks Wynne’s chief of staff Patricia Sorbara broke the elections law by offering him a financial incentive to get out. As you know, the Ontario Provincial Police are investigating and have laid no charges at this point.

The same questions, with the same (to be generous) limited answers. Nobody did anything wrong, we’re co-operating with the police, nothing to see here. One hundred and thirty-one times.

The opposition finally broke the streak Monday, when the Tories asked a question about social housing and the New Democrats asked about health-care cuts. It had gotten a little ridiculous.

Throughout the marathon, I kept thinking of this account from Progressive Conservative ex-MPP Rob Leone, about how the opposition followed substantially this strategy in its pursuit of the Liberals over the scandal over the costs of cancelling those gas-fired generating stations. They just kept hammering and hammering and hammering, often knowing full well there wasn’t much more to say about the issue, but they did it in a concerted effort to keep the Liberals talking about this thing that really made them look bad.

Of course, as Leone wrote, they had a whole lot of luck along the way.

The remarkable thing about the gas plant saga is that every time I thought the process was dying a slow death, something else happened. Whether that was more document discoveries or the privacy commissioner’s report or the auditor-general reports or the OPP investigation, we had no idea in 2012 that we’d still be talking about gas plants in 2015. Unlike the other scandals, this one seemed to stick. At a number of junctures, this process could have ended, but a series of events kept it alive.

It ultimately helped chase Dalton McGuinty out of office.

That hasn’t really happened with the Sudbury situation, the conclusion of the Elections Ontario examination being the significant but temporary exception. Also, although the opposition talked about gas plants pretty much every day in question period, they talked about other things, too.

Monday, after the legislature returned from a week’s break, interim Tory leader Jim Wilson asked a Sudbury question first and then the opposition moved on.

Wynne’s approval rating is 36 per cent, according to Angus Reid’s latest poll. Also, it’s down three points since December, which is obviously undesirable if you’re a Liberal but also not a devastating decline. Maybe without new oxygen, the Sudbury affair has given the opposition all it can for now.

]]>http://ottawacitizen.com/news/politics/reevely-ontarios-opposition-asks-131-straight-questions-about-sudbury/feed0060614-0607_prest-W.jpg-PJT-Queen'sPark-26.jpg-POS1405141012092243davidreevelyScreen Shot 2015-03-23 at 10.44.28 AMReevely: Gas-plant report reveals little more than partisan politicshttp://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/reevely-gas-plant-report-reveals-little-more-than-partisan-politics
http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/reevely-gas-plant-report-reveals-little-more-than-partisan-politics#commentsWed, 18 Feb 2015 02:41:26 +0000http://ottawacitizen.com/?p=458409]]>The billion-dollar decision to scrap plans for two gas-fired energy plants near Toronto was nobody’s fault, really. Unless it was everybody’s. Look, mistakes were made and there’s lots of blame to go around. So says the official report on the matter from the Ontario legislature’s justice committee, released Tuesday.

This is the business that dominated Queen’s Park for well over a year. What did then-premier Dalton McGuinty and his staff know about the price of cancelling the plants in Oakville and Mississauga before the 2011 election, and when? What was McGuinty’s chief of staff, David Livingston, thinking, if, as is alleged by the OPP in their investigation, he had the boyfriend of one of his subordinates go through government computers to wipe out masses of emails?

The committee heard from 93 witnesses and pored over thousands of documents. Last fall, it stopped.

Winding up the committee’s hearings on the gas plants was one of the first things now-premier Kathleen Wynne did with the power of her new majority government. The committee started writing, with the now-omnipowerful Liberals deciding what its report would say. Nothing too bad for them, as it turns out.

“In 2010 and 2011 the Government of Ontario listened to the concerns of residents in Oakville and Mississauga and announced the relocation of two power plants, a decision that all three recognized parties in the Legislature supported,” the report begins. Those are the first words, right after the table of contents and list of abbreviations.

Yes, look, OK, the cost of doing that, whatever it might have been (as much as $1.1 billion, if you listen to the auditor general), was “unacceptably high,” but it all came from deep respect for the people of Ontario. Love, dare we say it.

Once the decision was made to cancel the plants — one of which was under construction already — the Liberals did the only thing any reasonable people would: They negotiated due compensation for the builders. You wouldn’t expect them to just tear the contracts up, would you? There would have been lawsuits. By settling with those builders, TransCanada and Greenfield, the government was protecting taxpayers.

Now, yes, perhaps some other things went badly. If Ontario had had a better system for deciding where power plants go, maybe the Oakville and Mississauga sites wouldn’t have been chosen. Speaking of which, you know who needs to step up and take some blame for that? Bloody Oakville and Mississauga.

“In Oakville, citizens objected to plans for a new electricity generation plant, however, there was no plan in the City to consider the energy needs of a growing community,” the committee report says. “In Mississauga, official plans in 2004 made specific reference to ‘power generation’ as an allowable use of certain lands. However, it seems that consideration had not been given to the implications of developers relying on those designations in particular places. … It is up to municipalities to manage their land uses, as only they can.”

Three out of 20 pages in the main report are about what a problem these city governments are. The poor provincial agencies had to act on their own and they did their best.

As for deleting all those records, again mistakes were made. The big problem there was that public officials apparently didn’t know that keeping public documents where the public might be able to see them was something they were supposed to do, thanks to lax training. The police have uncovered documents suggesting that McGuinty’s staff may have kept some exchanges off government email servers deliberately, so that access-to-information requests could never find them, but the committee says it was all errors made in good faith.

This is, in short, all lipstick. In a pair of dissents, the Progressive Conservatives and the New Democrats draw attention to the pig.

What’s missing, the opposition points out, is an acknowledgment that the Liberals got themselves into their own mess and, despite several opportunities to limit the damage by simply admitting they’d screwed up, kept going. They still can’t bring themselves to display the self-criticism you’d find in an average teenager.

“Simply, the Liberal Government feels it is enough to say they made mistakes and next time they’ll be a little more open about it,” the Tory dissent says. “This promise should be taken with a large grain of salt as the report essentially contains no definitive resolutions that this should occur. And, if any of the potential recommendations are construed that way, it is important to realize that they are all non-binding.”

The New Democrats’ dissent is more of a primal scream. “By doubling down on Conservative hydro privatization, the Liberals helped to create a situation like a pile of oily rags already smoldering and hurting ratepayers, and Liberal greed and entitlement was the match that caused it to explode into a full-blown scandal,” it says.

The Tory and NDP versions ignore the inconvenient fact that they opposed the gas plants, too. We’ll never know how they would have dealt with a political position that turned out to be very poorly conceived.

A joint report by a committee that wasn’t dominated by any one party might have been interesting. This one is the product of a legislature with a sharp partisan divide, in which the majority government believes it can do no wrong and the opposition believes the government can do no right. Anybody hoping for a full reckoning of how the Liberals mishandled the gas plants so comprehensively is still waiting.

]]>http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/reevely-gas-plant-report-reveals-little-more-than-partisan-politics/feed00110 wynnedavidreevelyPolice search McGuinty aide's BlackBerry after finding signs he used it for secret exchangeshttp://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/police-search-mcguinty-aides-blackberry-after-finding-signs-he-used-it-for-secret-exchanges
http://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/police-search-mcguinty-aides-blackberry-after-finding-signs-he-used-it-for-secret-exchanges#commentsSat, 07 Feb 2015 15:15:54 +0000http://ottawacitizen.com/?p=450560]]>Provincial police have searched a BlackBerry used by Dalton McGuinty’s former chief of staff, believing it might contain emails or documents David Livingston deliberately kept off government email systems in case they’d later come back to haunt him.

Among the evidence they used to get a judge’s permission to scour the device: An exchange they’d already recovered from an earlier search, in which Livingston joked about making sure to keep an email in which his subordinate Laura Miller called a New Democrat legislator an “absolute a–hole,” so people poring over their records later would get to see it.

Unlike other emails, the exchange says, that one wouldn’t get special treatment that would scrub messages from the government’s files before routine backups of their email accounts captured them.

The exchange between Livingston and Miller, McGuinty’s deputy chief of staff, is included in an affidavit filed in court by OPP Det. André Duval. He’s one of the Ottawa investigators pursuing a case against Livingston on allegations that he breached the public trust by giving Miller’s boyfriend, computer expert Peter Faist, access to government computers to delete potentially important records in the last days of McGuinty’s premiership.

The documents, particularly email exchanges, might reveal who knew what when about the true costs of moving two gas-fired electrical power plants before the 2011 provincial election. The costs were initially pegged at $40 million but a subsequent auditor-general’s report put the total long-term price of moving both plants at nearly $1 billion. The OPP have carried out numerous interviews and searches of offices and hard drives in their investigation, retrieving hundreds of thousands of documents and looking for traces of others.

Duval’s affidavit notes that they’ve found hardly any sign that Livingston was involved in any discussion of the gas-plants plans, which he finds implausible because it was such an important matter for the government. Investigators think that the BlackBerry, which they’ve had in their hands for a year and a half but haven’t had permission to go through, might contain some of what they’re looking for.

Livingston, through his lawyer, has denied any wrongdoing. His record-keeping might have been slack by some standards, he has said, but not out of keeping with usual practices.

McGuinty is not the subject of any investigation. To be clear, the investigation is about giving Faist the technical authority to get into government computers, not about the gas-plants decision itself.

Both men have said that McGuinty’s office had a culture of oral discussions, debates and decisions, meaning there are often few records that explain what the people on the premier’s staff were thinking as they made choices about the future of Ontario.

Duval’s affidavit says he believes the practices went beyond that. A practice of not keeping records is bad for posterity but is not against any rules. Erasing files on purpose is another matter. Although the law has long required important documents to be kept, there was no punishment spelled out for destroying them; the Liberals under Premier Kathleen Wynne passed a law imposing fines of up to $5,000 for destroying records.

The exchange that prompted the investigators’ request to seize the BlackBerry Livingston used is from early 2012 when Livingston was the chief executive of the government agency Infrastructure Ontario and before he went to work for McGuinty. An assistant deputy minister, Victoria Vidal-Ribas, wrote to Livingston’s assistant secretary: “Do you have a pin for DL? For the ultra confidential ultra secret stuff?”

The secretary wrote back with the device’s “personal identification number,” which can be used to send messages from one BlackBerry to another without going through government computers.

“I believe that one of the reasons that investigators were unable to locate messages concerning the gas plants or government records management, is that communications related to those issues were often conducted offline through the assistance of a government issued BlackBerry cellular telephone,” Duval writes in his affidavit. “I believe that this type of communication was favoured since it was not routed through the government email accounts and avoided the creation of any government records which could potentially be reviewed following a Freedom of Information request.”

That was the sort of thing McGuinty’s staff did in several ways, according to the affidavit.

For one thing, the reference to double-deleting emails (removing them from an email account’s inbox and then specifically erasing them from a holding area where they’d still be recoverable) came after Miller sent Livingston a copy of a news release sent out by Algoma-Manitoulin New Democratic Party MPP Michael Mantha, condemning McGuinty’s handling of the rescue effort after the roof of a shopping mall in Elliot Lake caved in and killed two people.

The CBC had received documents under access-to-information legislation that suggested McGuinty’s office was indecisive about what to do in the crisis, which Mantha attacked in his news release.

“FOI This,” Miller commented, using jargon for filing a freedom-of-information request. “Mantha is an absolute a–hole.”

“LOL!” Livingston responded. “This one will never get the Double Delete.”

For another, Faist provided police with his own records of exchanges he had on the subject of the mass erasings they’re investigating, including emails the investigators were unable to retrieve from the government hard drives. (Duval’s affidavit says they believe Faist didn’t know that the work, for which he was paid $10,000, would break any rules.)

In a third case, investigators retrieved an exchange involving Miller and McGuinty staffers Neala Barton and Beckie Codd-Downey about a previous message the police haven’t been able to find.

Miller, writing from her government email address, told the others she was “not sure why I received that last email on this account.”

“Roger,” Barton replied. “Have been dealing with it by phone.”

“Sorry about that,” Codd-Downey added, “was trying to get you guys asap. Talked to Dave. Will delete my copies.”

“Sorry,” Barton wrote a few minutes later. “Meant to say that I saw the one you were talking about. Hadn’t connected the dots. Connected them. All offline now.”

Writes Duval, commenting on that exchange: “Those emails seemed to indicate that there was an implied directive that some information should not be sent to government email accounts. … The investigators were unable to locate the email referred to by Ms. Miller among the 58,000 recovered. I must assume that this email was ‘double deleted’ and cannot be recovered.”

Miller left Ontario after McGuinty left office and went to work for B.C. Premier Christy Clark. Barton, after a stint working for Alison Redford when she was premier of Alberta, is in Toronto as a senior communications official with the Pan-Am Games organizing committee. Codd-Downey was a spokeswoman for Energy Minister Bob Chiarelli for a while and is now on Wynne’s staff.

]]>http://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/police-search-mcguinty-aides-blackberry-after-finding-signs-he-used-it-for-secret-exchanges/feed0David LivingstondavidreevelyReevely: Wynne hangs tough on new sex-ed curriculum, despite conservative criticshttp://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/reevely-wynne-hangs-tough-on-new-sex-ed-curriculum-despite-conservative-critics
http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/reevely-wynne-hangs-tough-on-new-sex-ed-curriculum-despite-conservative-critics#commentsTue, 27 Jan 2015 22:47:46 +0000http://ottawacitizen.com/?p=441555]]>Premier Kathleen Wynne will plow ahead with a new program to teach young students in Ontario the rudiments of sexual consent, she made it clear this week, calling a news conference to make the point.

Wynne has said it before: to deal with harassment and sexual violence, we need to start earlier. Part of the plan is to bring in a new school curriculum that talks about these issues, replacing the one Ontario has been using since 1998. Wynne’s predecessor Dalton McGuinty scrapped an earlier attempt to do it in 2010, cowed by outrage from social conservatives who didn’t like the idea of blunt talk about sex in middle-school health classes.

They’re still outraged, but Wynne is pressing on. Monday afternoon, she met with two Toronto high-school students, Tessa Hill and Lia Valente, and then brought them out to see her tell reporters how firmly she supports a petition they organized in support of teaching consent in earlier grades.

“They’re awesome,” Wynne said of the teens. “They’re awesome and articulate young women who were already working on this issue before it became such a hot topic in the media.”

It became a hot topic after the dismissal of CBC host Jian Ghomeshi over allegations that he attacked women — part of what he’s said was rough but consensual sex, and several of the women say was violence they’d never agreed to. Ghomeshi was so sure it was all OK that he showed certain videos to his bosses at the CBC, expecting the recordings would prove his case. He ended up fired and charged.

More than 37,000 people have signed Hill’s and Valente’s petition, which Wynne takes “as a really strong endorsement of what we must do,” she said. The question is “How do we create a culture that recognizes and acknowledges what consent is, when it’s explicit and when it’s not explicit?”

What’s often talked about in shorthand as a new sex-education curriculum is a much broader health program, covering everything from nutrition to self-esteem, body image to resisting peer pressure. Setting boundaries and building the confidence to stick to them starts early. So does respecting the limits set by other people. It’s not so different whether we’re talking about a game of tag when you’re six or a one-night romance when you’re 20.

“Starting right in the primary and junior grades, so from Grade 1 right through Grade 6, kids will be learning listening skills … from the time they enter school,” Wynne said.

Not long after Wynne spoke, up popped social-conservative leader Charles McVety to worry publicly about what Wynne’s really up to. McVety is the president of Canada Christian College and was a key organizer in the campaign that shut down the last attempt to update the health curriculum in 2010. He says he still speaks for 105,000 “members and parents across Ontario.”

Though “we applaud Kathleen Wynne’s plan to teach children to say no to sex, we abhor the premier announcing that Ontario’s teachers will be forced to teach little children how to give permission for that child to engage in sex,” McVety said. “I don’t think it is legal to advise a child before the age of sixteen on how to give sexual consent.”

Right.

If they teach you in gym to climb a rope using both hands and your knees, they’re also teaching you how to fall and hurt yourself by switching to your elbows and one ear when you’re 15 feet up. In some sort of abstract philosophical sense, instruction in a particular area is, indirectly, instruction in its opposite.

In a practical sense, though, how far gone does a person have to be to think the premier wants to teach six-year-olds how to say yes to sex?

There’s a legitimate debate we can have about how schools can teach facts without usurping parents’ right to teach both morality and their idea of prudence. Sex isn’t photosynthesis — just a thing that happens, the facts of which can be taught with strict neutrality. Reasonable people of goodwill can disagree about who should do what with whom and how these matters should be talked about. Schools and the politicians who oversee them need to respect a range of parents’ views on these things, which isn’t easy.

McVety’s take is not a contribution to that debate, except in that it demonstrates that the noisiest of the objections to the new curriculum aren’t to be taken seriously.

TORONTO — Ontario’s governing Liberals have decided taxpayers will no longer be on the hook for about $10,000 they paid a computer expert to allegedly wipe hard drives in the premier’s office.

Court documents released last week show Ontario Provincial Police allege a computer expert with no security clearance was paid to delete documents in former Premier Dalton McGuinty’s office.

Police investigating deleted documents on the cancellation of two gas plants at a cost of up to $1.1 billion allege the payment of taxpayer money to Peter Faist, the spouse of McGuinty’s deputy chief of staff, was made by Liberal Caucus Services.

Premier Kathleen Wynne’s press secretary says in a statement that the Ontario Liberal Party executive council voted Monday to cover the payment so no tax dollars go toward work currently under police investigation.

Zita Astravas says the payment “is in no way intended as a prejudgment or comment upon the findings of the ongoing police investigation.”

She says they had no information until the release of the court documents that any services invoiced by Faist were related to matters under investigation.

Lawyers representing Faist and his spouse Laura Miller have said their clients did nothing wrong.

The New Democrats said “it’s a sad state of affairs” when it takes a police investigation for the Liberals to admit they were wrong.

“They wasted billions. They did everything they could to destroy the evidence and cover it up. And Kathleen Wynne is continuing the cover up by protecting Peter Faist and Laura Miller,” NDP house leader Gilles Bisson said in a statement.

Related

]]>http://ottawacitizen.com/news/politics/ontario-liberals-to-reimburse-taxpayers-10000-paid-to-allegedly-wipe-hard-drives/feed0122314-ONT_Gas_Plant_20140518-32121173-ONT_Gas_Plant_20140518-W.jpgkendemannocReevely: Premier Kathleen Wynne talks oil prices, smart meters and gas plant hearingshttp://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/reevely-premier-kathleen-wynne-talks-oil-prices-smart-meters-and-gas-plant-hearings-with-the-citizen
http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/reevely-premier-kathleen-wynne-talks-oil-prices-smart-meters-and-gas-plant-hearings-with-the-citizen#commentsFri, 19 Dec 2014 16:00:07 +0000http://ottawacitizen.com/?p=413804]]>At the end of a tumultuous year in provincial politics, which began with Premier Kathleen Wynne trying to salvage her government and ended with her in control of a Liberal majority government, the Citizen’s David Reevely talked to her about some of the most controversial decisions she’s made and the most difficult challenges she’s taken on.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

In November, Finance Minister Charles Sousa’s fiscal update showed that just since July, he’d had to revise forecasts of government revenues down by $500 million but had only found $200 million in spending cuts, chewing up a third of the $1-billion contingency fund built into the province’s budget this year. It makes the Liberals’ repeated promise to eliminate a $12.5-billion deficit by 2017 look increasingly difficult to achieve.

Q: I’ve been struck every time there’s been a budget or a fiscal update that things don’t seem to be going quite as well as they were supposed to be. Why should we trust your government’s predictions on the state of the province’s finances over the next year or two?

A: We’ve worked very hard to put the most small-c conservative projections in place. We work with economists, we get outside validation — which we did in the budget — of our revenue numbers. I think that’s what people can expect, that we will do our utmost to get the best projections possible, and then if things happen that we don’t have any control over, then it’s just that, we don’t have control over them.

Last year, when we were blindsided by the federal government and the over-$600-million hit, we couldn’t have predicted that. This year, it looks like we’ve made some progress and we’re up on that revenue expectation in terms of the federal government. So we’ll continue to try to get the best projections possible.

Q: But in spite of all the effort to get the projections right, we’ve had a couple of updates in a row where the revenues have been down, spending has been down to try to compensate but you seem to be having trouble keeping that gap as tight as possible.

A: This is the financial world, right? Did everybody get it right in terms of oil prices? No, I don’t think so. I mean, the fact is there are projections on the economy, some of which are borne out and others are not. The things that we have control over, in terms of meeting our targets and meeting the commitments that we have made, those are the commitments that people can look to us to meet. But in terms of the externalities, we don’t have control over all those things. So as you say, as we’ve dealt with the revenue issues, we’ve found the offsetting spending solutions. We’re going to continue to do everything in our power and we will hit those targets.

The price of oil has fallen from about $110 a barrel last summer to under $60 a barrel now, mainly thanks to a supply glut. That’s hard on Alberta’s oilpatch but it’s lowered fuel costs and driven down the value of the Canadian dollar.

Q: You mentioned oil prices. What do you think low oil prices are going to mean for Ontario in the next year?

A: Lower oil prices and a related lower dollar, that does help manufacturing. I’m not going to pretend there isn’t some benefit there. In terms of businesses that are connected to the oilsands — and Ontario’s economy is connected to Alberta’s — it’s a problem for all of us. I’ve been very clear since I’ve been in this job that I see the connectedness among the provinces and across the country. I don’t wish ill on Alberta’s economy.

Q: Do you think it’ll be a net positive or a net negative for Ontario?

A: You know what, I’m not an economist. I’m not going to be able to answer that question. We’ll let the economists make those predictions.

Restraining public-sector wages is crucial if the Liberals are to meet their deficit targets. The government got AMAPCEO, a union representing management and professional employees in the Ontario public service, to agree to a four-year deal in August that freezes their pay for two years and gives them 1.4 per cent increases for two years after that. But now it’s bargaining with the 76,000-strong Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario and the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, both of which took membership votes in which 90 per cent of the members authorized their leaders to call strikes if they believe they’re necessary.

Q: You’re in bargaining with some the biggest unions that you deal with.

A: Yup.

Q: You got a pretty good, pretty quick deal with AMAPCEO, but ETFO and OPSEU have taken strike votes. I know that’s part of the dance, but what are you going to do to convince their bargainers that a couple of years of zeros are in the best interest not only of Ontario, but of their members?

A: That’s going to happen at the table. As we’ve said, we don’t have any new money for salaries and benefits, and any time there’s going to be an increase, there has to be a balancing offset within the funding amount, within the funding envelope. But that discussion will happen at the bargaining table.

As you said, the fact of the strike vote really isn’t anything that people need to worry about. It is part of what unions and federations do to organize their membership. That has nothing to do with whether we’ll get to a collective agreement or not.

A Liberal majority on the legislature’s justice-policy committee forced an end to hearings on how former premier Dalton McGuinty and his staff dealt with the cancellations of two gas-powered generating stations before the 2011 election. They chose not to hear from McGuinty’s former aide, Laura Miller, and her partner, Peter Faist, who was named by the OPP as having tried to erase documents that might have explained the decision.

Q: The justice-policy committee has been working on its report on the deletion of emails under your predecessor. I wanted to ask you how that process is served by cutting off the witness list, and specifically by not hearing from Peter Faist and Laura Miller on subjects the committee didn’t know to ask about when they had a chance.

A: I think that it is the case that there are, there are members on the committee that would have liked to see it go on forever. We made a decision before the election and in the election campaign that thousands, hundreds of thousands of documents and the hours that had been spent — I think 70 witnesses or something — that that was enough information, that issues were being revisited and it was time for the report to be written.

In fact, there had been opposition members of the committee that said it was time to get on with writing the report. This is not precluding testimony, this is about writing a report on the hundreds of hours of testimony that had already been heard.

Q: Sure, but having a couple more days of hearings to hear from some pretty key people would not have been a big problem for the committee. Is there something I’m not getting about something that would open up in terms of extending the hearings?

A: Again, we had made the decision it was time to write the report. That opinion has already been expressed on the committee. It’s what I ran on. I was asked over and over again, I was very clear, people heard me say it. So that’s what we’re doing.

Auditor general Bonnie Lysyk’s annual report found the province has spent nearly $2 billion on smart electricity meters but reaped negligible benefits from them, partly because there isn’t a big enough premium on electricity at peak times.

Q: The auditor-general’s report produced a lot of crummy headlines, particularly about smart meters. That’s been a sore spot in provincial policy for practically a decade. Do you have an idea of how you can sell the smart meters to people who don’t see that they’re working and now have this auditor general’s report to wave around to support that point?

A: I think the most important point about the smart meters is they do make it possible for people to conserve. And they make it possible for people to know more about their usage because of time-of-use pricing. The fact is that our long-term energy plan is very much a conservation-first energy plan, and if we are going to have the kind of conservation we want over the next decade to 20 years, we need to have the data in order to be able to do that.

I know that there are divided opinions on the smart meters. I also know there is a strong school of thought and experience that is supportive of the work that’s been done on the smart meters, sees them as a shrewd investment, is what I think the environmental commissioner has called them, and they have demonstrated that there is the possibility of success. Three per cent of Toronto’s peak load is off peak because of the existence of smart meters. So I’m confident that as people get more used to them, as they become more the norm and people get more information, that people will see the utility of them.

I think one of the issues that has clouded this is the notion that somehow having smart meters was going to, in an absolute way, reduce energy costs across the board. What smart meters have done is they’ve allowed the cost of energy, the increases, to be mitigated. And so yes, the cost of energy has gone up. We are closer to paying the real cost of energy than we have been in the past. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. Do we need to make sure energy is affordable and we have programs in place that allow people to conserve and to have cheaper energy at certain times of day, and supports for people who are living in poor circumstances? Absolutely. And we’ve got all those in place.

Q: One of the things Bonnie Lysyk pointed out is that while smart meters make a lot of things possible, including making people pay something closer to the real price of the energy they use, they haven’t been used that way to the extent that they could have or should have been.

A: That’s a matter of degree, if I may say. With the smart meters, that is possible, and we need more of it to happen. I’m the first to say we need to use them better, we need people to understand the data better, we need people to understand time-of-use pricing better, and to find ways to take advantage of it.

I used the example in the legislature about the ice storm and the data we had because of the smart meters. I don’t know if you heard (Toronto Hydro president) Anthony Haines talk about using the smart meters to identify people who might be at risk, vulnerable people who might need support, by being able to access their smart meters. That kind of usage is only going to increase and it’s only possible because smart meters exist.

This month, Wynne publicly said multiple ministries, including justice, education, labour and health, will be re-examining how they and their staff deal with sexual assault and harassment issues, from criminal complaints to unhealthy cultures on university campuses. They’re to start producing formal plans for changes by March.

Q: I was struck by how comprehensive your plans are when it comes to addressing sexual harassment and sexual assault, all the ministers who’ve been brought in to do work on this. You’ve been a woman in public life for an extended period. Do you have personal experience of this that informs your thinking on it?

A: Oh, my position on this is that there are very few women in the world who don’t have experience of discrimination. In terms of my personal experience of sexual assault or sexual violence, I don’t have those experiences. But I believe that this is a continuum. So have I as a woman been very clear that there’s a power dynamic in which I have less power, between me and men? Absolutely. And it’s a thing that I’ve been conscious of my whole life. I can remember as a teenager railing against these realities. I am very, very sure that there are thousands and thousands of women who have stories that they haven’t been able to tell anyone and we need to do everything we can to help them to deal with those.

Q: One more. What issues do you think are going to dominate the business of the legislature in the coming year?

A: I hope that we’ll be focused on doing everything we can to facilitate the creation of jobs. I’m always reluctant or hesitant to say we’re going to create jobs — I know the private-sector creates jobs, and so I want us to be really focused on what we can do to help people to find work, to help businesses to create more opportunity.

Some of the programs we’re going to be bringing in, Experience Ontario, really builds on the success that we’ve had with the youth employment fund, and it’s going to allow young people, after school, to have a year where they will have an opportunity to be in a job placement and get an idea of what they might want to do when they go into post-secondary. I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to focus on those kinds of issues.

I have no doubt that there will be questions about the accountability of government. There always are. But my hope is that the context in which we’ll be working is ‘How do we get the economy cooking?’